What would you do to generate substantial customer loyalty for your brand? You may already understand that having a loyal customer base that’s excited about your business is a key to generating repeat revenues, but creating that loyalty might still be a mystery.

As it turns out, it may be that all you need to do is to start cultivating a community around your products and services. Today, we’ll touch on the importance of building a unique customer community, and how you can use a strong community to help grow your business.

What Defines A Customer Community?

In short, a customer community is a place for consumers of your brand to connect with one another. They may share their experiences with your products/services, ask and answer questions about your brand, converse about what they’d like to see in the future, and link over shared ideas they have about your business and industry at large.

Customer communities often congregate in online spaces, such as forums, chat groups, or social media. While many businesses have a habit of ignoring these spaces, it’s actually in your best interests to foster them and guide their growth, as you’ll learn next.

Why Bother Creating A Customer Community?

Perhaps more than anything else, having a strong customer community can aid in the value realization process, by which customers see how your business solutions enrich their lives, business, organization, etc. It may be that customers start off using your product/service, then after a positive experience begin engaging with your online community. 

From there, the conversations they have with like-minded consumers start to reaffirm the value your brand offers. This leads to your customers being more satisfied long-term, and increases the chances you might have to cross-sell, upsell, and boost your revenues.

A strong community can grant you insights into what your customers think and feel, allowing you to better anticipate their needs and adjust your procedures to their expectations. What’s more, a customer community can serve as advocates of your brand, bringing others into the fold and increasing your customer base, so it’s definitely something you should invest in.

Tips For Jumpstarting Your Customer Community

More than anything else, you’re going to need to give your customers a reason to meet up and form a community around what you offer. On top of ensuring that your wares have value and deliver quality, you’ll want to make sure that there’s a hook that can help generate discussions — be that users of your product generating content, sharing tales of their experiences, or formulating tips and tricks that help the community get more out of your offerings.

From there, you’ll have to do your part to facilitate discussions in the community, keep the community active, and advocate for your brand. This can start with ushering users toward a particular platform around which your brand community can easily coalesce. 

As the community starts to form and engage in conversations, you’ll need to involve your business in those conversations as well. In time, it will help continuously generate discussions and keep customers focused on the things they enjoy about your business and your brand.